Voidstar: bloghttp://www.voidstar.com/module.php?mod=blog
Recently updated blogs.enjulian_bond@voidstar.com (Julian Bond)Kopyleft. All rights reversed. Public domain. Do what you like with it.Ah, the joys of trying to earn pocket money from Google AdSense on a personal bloghttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4082
Way back in 2005, I wrote a little piece about my search for Turkish rolling tobacco[1]. Today, Adsense noticed that it links to somebody who sells tobacco. Which of course is a heinous sin and violates their programme policies! We can't be selling advertising on a web page that links to a tobacco salesman. So I get a warning and rap over the knuckles. I've now deleted the blog entry which should keep them quiet.

I ran into this once before over alcohol where I'd posted one of my "Friday Night Cocktail" recipes with a link to a specific brand website on G+. Another heinous sin because I'd neglected to specify my posts as being for over 18s and we can't be linking to a website that might sell or promote alcohol.

At least this time I didn't get the "You did something really bad and we might block and delete your account, but we won't tell you what it was" routine.

[1] 6 years now since I gave up. I don't miss the smoking but I do still occasionally miss the process of smoking.
[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4082Tue, 28 Nov 2017 16:42:00 GMTThe Labour party membership renewal team are phoning me about once a week at the moment. I'm havinghttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4081
https://action.labour.org.uk/page/s/membership-contact-form

This is what I sent:-

While I broadly support the Labour Party and it's principles, I will not be renewing my membership until the Labour Party formally commits to stopping Brexit and cancelling Article 50.
[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4081Tue, 28 Nov 2017 09:18:00 GMTSack Boris petition. You know what to dohttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4080
https://www.change.org/p/boris-step-down-as-foreign-secretary

[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4080Thu, 09 Nov 2017 17:33:00 GMTIn the last couple of years, the Poly-Named-One posted a comment on the Charles Stross Blog (http://http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4079
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/) explaining it's categorising levels of Meta from M1-M5. I've been completely unable to find this again. Google and the Blog's search engine are failing to track it down, or my search-Fu is hopeless. Anyone remember this and can help me find it?

Is there a place to have the kind of meta-discussions about the blog that would rightly be blocked by the moderators within a specific blog-comments thread? I was kind of expecting a sub-Reddit but can't see one.

And incidentally, there's a discussion to be had about appropriate places in 2018 for posting personal long form text. People rightly hate Medium. And self hosted blogs-RSS are a bit out of favour these days. Blogspot-Wordpress style insta-blogs always run the risk of censorship or simply going out of business. The Social Media platforms have similar censorship issues and are generally hopeless for long form text. I've even seen https://txt.fyi/ suggested. It may work, but it feels like a toy.
[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4079Wed, 08 Nov 2017 09:17:00 GMTToday is the 800th anniversary of The Charter Of The Foresthttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4078
https://www.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/celebrating-800th-anniversary-charter-forest/

Quoting:

The Charter of the Forest is among the first ecological charters in history and among the first to assert the rights of the common man and woman.

As it coincided with the first feminist advance, in a modified Article 7 of the Magna Carta, which could have been in the Forest Charter, it could also be called a first feminist charter.

The Charter has the distinction of being the most durable piece of legislation in British history, having only been superseded in 1971, with the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Act, by when most of its principles had been embedded in other legislation, including the Commons Act of 1876, which ruled that enclosure should be allowed only if there were public benefit, and by the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919.

Â Celebrating the 800th anniversary of the Charter of the ForestÂ Â»
This year is the 800th anniversary of a founding document of the British constitution, and of other constitutions as well. Issued in the name of a ten-year-old King Henry III alongside the modified Charter of Liberties that had been sealed by King John and the barons at Runnymede on June 15, 2015 th...

[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4077Mon, 30 Oct 2017 07:51:00 GMTA few weeks ago, I posted an article about the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer â€” just what happenshttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4076
"Paperclip Maximiser"

Yonatan Zunger originally shared this post:
A few weeks ago, I posted an article about the Parable of the Paperclip Maximizer â€” just what happens when an AI has clear goals and no sense of balance about achieving them. But this parable has just been utterly perfected by Frank Lantz of the NYU Game Center, who has built a game all about it. It's a browser game, it's free to play, it can be played end-to-end in about a day, and it is unreasonably satisfying and fun. And addictive.

It is, in fact, a Cow Clicker about Paperclip Maximizing.

At first, I was making paperclips â€“Â first bending them by hand, then buying machines, managing market prices, buying wire when the market is favorable. An hour and a half in, I was mostly focused on getting better at game theory tournaments so that I could improve the AI I was using to cure cancer, solve climate change, and bring about world peace on the one hand (and so build public trust in my paperclip company) and manipulate financial markets on the other hand (so that I would have enough money to bribe officials into trusting me with the HypnoDrones).

Suffice it to say that the game gets even more interesting from there.

Something I really love about it is how many different games it really is: every time you get good at something, not only do new mechanics show up, but radically new mechanics show up, so that it feels like you just played a dozen games in rapid succession. And the ending (at least, the ending I got to) is smooth, perfect, and deeply satisfying.

This is a true gem among seemingly simple games.

One warning: It does not work well on mobile; you'll want a computer for this.

As far as I can tell Spotify's genre tags are curated by Spotify or one of their suppliers. And not generated by their users like last.fm So your idea of what's in uk funky or such like may not agree with their's. I've just had a quick look at Google Music again. And their Genre tagging is all over the place as well.
[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4075Tue, 17 Oct 2017 09:39:00 GMTBoth Mastodon.social and Mastodon.cloud seem to be borkedhttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4074
Admin@Mastodon.cloud said he was moving servers and updating to 1.6.1 so maybe it all went horribly wrong. Admin@Mastodon.social is the main mastodon developer which suggests the problem might be the new 1.6.1 release.

This makes me sad. Even though the Mastodon community doesn't really feel like it's really taken off just yet. We've become used to systems that just work so having two of the major instances just go off line is not good.
[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4074Mon, 02 Oct 2017 15:02:00 GMTPeople of the UK, your attention please. I don't know why you're complaining that the government didhttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4073
http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4073Fri, 29 Sep 2017 13:44:00 GMThttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4072
http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4072Wed, 13 Sep 2017 07:19:00 GMT2023: A Trilogy by The Justified Ancients of Mu Muhttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4071
[from: Librarything]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4071Tue, 12 Sep 2017 06:35:00 GMTJust Say No To Racismhttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4070
Lest we forget, it's 40 years since Lewisham and the National Front March and riots. It was one of the biggest in the late 70s that inspired the Anti-Racism movement.

Mosley, NF, BNP, EDL, UKIP, Brexit. The UK's xenophobic far right takes many names but it's the same thing over and over again. It keeps re-appearing and each generation has to fight it and knock it back again.

1. Brexiteers: your BEST prediction now is that the UK will recover economically from Brexit within 30 years. In other wordsâ€¦
2. â€¦ I have to suck up living in a shit country for the rest of my life just because you don't like Belgium
3. I trust you'll forgive me when I tell you to go fuck yourselves, and to KEEP fucking yourselves for the foreseeable future.
4. And re. The Will Of The People: when is someone in public life gonna have the guts to admit that The People Got It Wrong on this one?
5. Why is that such a toxic concept JUST with regard to the referendum? Surely after every election about half the country thinks that.
6. The democratic principle holds that wherever practicable the majority should prevail. NOT that the majority IS RIGHT.
7. And in this instance, I'm sorry, but it ISN'T practicable. The people were offered the impossible, they (VERY narrowly) voted for itâ€¦
8. â€¦ and now they're demanding (some of them) that they be GIVEN the impossible thing they voted for, because democracy.
9. Exiting the EU and being happier, richer and more secure as a consequence is IMPOSSIBLE. But that's what people were sold.
10. Exiting the EU and bankrupting the economy and splintering society is inevitable, but that wasn't on the ballot.
11. And no, I'm not advocating "endless referendums until you get a result you like"; I'm advocating people having an INFORMED choice.
12. The people were NOT given an informed choice last year. They were offered a fantasy, and trying to DELIVER that fantasy will doom us all
ï»¿
[from: Google+ Posts]]]>http://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4069Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:10:00 GMTJust once in a while Jagger and The Stones do a perfect political song. Remember "Undercover of thehttp://www.voidstar.com/node.php?id=4068
So here's "England Lost"https://youtu.be/98gj0z0RkXE